Interlaced

‘… I was greatly excited when the laces made their appearance. They were rolled on a wooden bobbin which was not to be seen for all the laces wound around it. Then we would unroll them slowly and watch the designs as they opened out and were always a little scared when one of them came to an end. They stopped so suddenly. First came strips of Italian work, tough pieces with drawn threads, in which everything was intermittently repeated. As obviously as in a peasant’s garden. Then all at once, our view would be shut off by a succession of grille-works of Venetian needle-point … and we looked deep into gardens that grew more and more artificial, until everything was as murky and warm to the eyes as in a hot-house; stately plants which we did not recognise opened their gigantic leaves, tendrils groped dizzily for one another, and the great open blossoms of the point d’Alencon dimmed everything with their scattered pollen. Suddenly, all weary and confused, we stepped out into the long track of the Valenciennes, and it was winter and early morning and hoar frost was on the ground. And we pushed through the snow-covered bushes of the Binche, and came to places where no one had ever been before; the branches hung so strangely downward, there might have been a grave beneath them – but that we concealed from each other. The cold pressed ever more closely upon us, and at last, when the fine pillow lace came, Mother said: ‘Oh we shall get frost flowers on our eyes!’ and so it was, too, for within us it was very warm. We both sighted when the laces had to be rolled up again.’

Excerpt from The Notebook of Malte Laudris Brigge, by Rainer Maria Rilke, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, The Hogarth Press, London, 1930, p 130–131.

A Czytelnik edition of The Notebook of Malte Laudris Brigge travelled with me on my long journey to Australia in the early 1980s, a refugee from communist Poland under martial law. I chose it not only for its travel-friendly size but because in his only novel, published in 1910, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke offers hypnotic descriptions of objects, including a passage about a secret collection of antique laces, a childhood memory of time spent with his mother narrated by Rilke’s alter ego Malte, a young Dane in Paris.